Definition of Own Work ?

I'm asking this, myself, because sometimes I read that some people claimes that they create it all by their selves. I'm talking about objects, materials, textures.

Example: I've got something in my mind going on, just fantasy, I search on the Inet, find finally some picture wich I like. Mostly it's a bad taking picture, so I start to work with it with several programms.

And after hours of hard work, I finally manage to create some object with materials and textures and add it to my Xpack.

I think it's yours, because you did create the object. Ok, somebody else did a photo, no problem It's just the matter of beeing onest to say what sources people take things from. For my track I still work on, I can say I used and blended some other textures, but also my own photos to make road textures, so I can say there are "mine", because I also spent much time to make them look this way. And I can also onestly say I did not see anything like that before - made by somebody else.
From other hand, it would be funny to see a list of some track's materials/textures with exact explanations of everything like: "this is from my photo" and "that building is from texture x blended with texture z but a roof is from a photo of my friend.
And finally - I think that if we see many textures all the time - it's easy to recognize them - "cheating" will be easily revealed

You don't always need a picture of a certain house to texture it, you can find similar textures on cg textures and use them on each part of the house. ie, a brick texture for the bricks, a roof tile texture for the roof tiles.
For the Pagoda I made for Duryea Hillclimb I got a picture of the Pagoda and used it as a reference to make the model, then used individual textures for each part. Except for the wooden railing not 1 texture was taken from any picture of the building, they all came from cg textures.

Think outside the box, a window from here, a door from there, all you need to do is find a texture that has something similar to what your looking for. A picture of a single plank of wood can be copied and pasted alongside itself, rotated 90deg and offset over and over to produce a unique image of a wooden floor.

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Yep, I'm creating textures all the time myself by taken pictures of simple things in my garden or whatever. And yes, hehe, just parts of a picture can be very interesting indeed Nobody will know ... Rotating and offset , great, good idea, I mean to rotate ! Always problems with this issue. Mianiak, when I have some time left I try to make your Pagoda even better, nice challenge/practise for me
But in common, tnx Martinez, the created end result is always yours, copyright unless some knows that you're borrowing....

As long as we do it for free and as long as other people share their track for free, I think IF we are onest and say onestly WHAT is ours and what is from other sources - there's nothing wrong to use some textures from Internet or from other tracks. If somebody asks me to share with my work, I usually don't refuse and I don't expect a reward (but it's just nice to hear some thanks). From the other hand I don't want to upload everything I do to avoid a mess - maybe some people would think it's a junk